Welcome to our collection of quotes by David Foster Wallace. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American author of novels, short stories and essays, and a university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time magazine cited as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, The Pale King (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years".
Wallace grew up in Illinois and attended Amherst College. He taught English at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. In 2008, he died by suicide at age 46 after struggling with depression for many years.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell.
The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable … If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.
You are excused from doing the work of constructing the fantasy. The ads do it for you. The ads, therefore, don't flatter your adult agency, or even ignore it--they supplant it.
This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose -- this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death.
You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness ... has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me.
There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.
At the end of the day the hatred for all of the work is just part of the work.
I have dickered over trinkets with malnourished children. I have learned what it is to become afraid of one's own cabin toilet. I have now heard--and am powerless to describe--reggae elevator music.
I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
Trying to be anti-cool is just one exponent off trying to be cool -- it's the same beast.
Psychotics, say what you want about them, tend to make the first move.
I'm a typical American, half of me is dying to give myself away and the other half is continually rebelling.
Many people in America throw the term fascism around, particularly for Middle-Eastern terrorists, but in fact what fascism really is is a close alliance between a unitary executive and a state and large corporations and a state.
I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today, of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.
Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith... Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
He suddenly felt nothing, or rather Nothing, a pre-tornadic stillness of zero sensation, as if he were the very space he occupied.
And when he came to, he was flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.
He didn't reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch as it floated away. He thought very broadly of desires and ideas being watched but not acted upon, he thought of impulses being starved of expression and dying out and floating dryly away.
Your personal will is the web your disease sits and spins in. The will you call your own ceased to be yours as of who knows how many Substance-drenched years ago.
God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about.
It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.
Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately ... To games or needles, to some other person.
This is why they started us here so young: to give ourselves away before the age when the questions 'why' and 'to what' grow real beaks and claws.
I felt more solidly composed, now that I was horizontal. I was impossible to knock down.
That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people...That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them.
I miss everyone. I can remember being young and feeling a thing and identifying it as homesickness, and then thinking well now that's odd, isn't it, because I was home, all the time. What on earth are we to make of that?
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T true is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.
Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.
What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.
But if I decide to decide there's a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won't the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?
Certain sincerely devout and spiritually advanced people believe that the God of their understanding helps them find parking places and gives them advice on Mass. Lottery numbers.
If the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
If Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.
I think the main function of contemporary irony is to protect the
speaker from being interpreted as naive or sentimental.
Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn't mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you're just never the same.
Kid, sobriety's like a hard-on; the minute you get it, you want to fuck with it.
Kafka's evocations are, rather, unconscious and almost sub-archetypal, the little-kid stuff from which myths derive; this is why we tend to call even his weirdest stories nightmarish rather than surreal.
A like N.B. that Ewell ends up inserting under the heading Biker is that every professional tattooist everybody who can remember getting their tattoos remembers getting them from was, from the sound of everybody's general description, a Biker.
Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.
I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.
It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely giftes as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.
Ortho Stice played with a kind of rigid, liquid grace, like a panther in a back-brace.
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
You might consider how to escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.
To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
Tornadoes were, in out part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense.
I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.
The entire ball game, in terms of both the exam and life, was what you gave attention to vs. what you willed yourself to not.
Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. TC mark.
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.
It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in...the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
We will, of course, without hesitation use art to parody, ridicule, debunk, or criticize ideologies -- but this is very different.
You have a great deal of yourself on the line, writing- your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing; a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal.
God, what a ghastly enterprise to be in, though-and what an odd way to achieve success. I'm an exhibitionist who wants to hide, but is unsuccessful at hiding; therefore, somehow I succeed.
The most dangerous thing about an academic education is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what's going on in front of me.
Instead of paying attention to what's going on inside me.
I'm screaming for help and everybody's acting as if I'm singing Ethel Merman covers.
And he wishes, in the cold quiet of his archer's heart, that he himself could feel the intensity of their reconciliations as strongly as he feels that of their battles.
It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monolog inside your head.
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.
Gately can't even imagine what it would be like to be a sober and drug-free biker. It's like what would be the point. He imagines these people polishing the hell out of their leather and like playing a lot of really precise pool.
For me, boviscopophobia is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port.
My worst character flaw that I'm conscious of is that I tend to think my way into circles instead of resolving anything. It's paralyzing and boring for people around me.
America, as everybody knows, is a country of many contradictions, and a big contradiction for a long time has been between a very aggressive form of capitalism and consumerism against what might be called a kind of moral or civic impulse.
At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.
Sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.
There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.